Towards The Age Of Useful Advertising

Towards The Age Of Useful Advertising

Many imposed advertising messages, particularly digital ones, are now perceived as intrusive by consumers.

According to the recent study done by the IFOP for Bonial.Eu, the Europeans say they are “annoyed” or “invaded” by most digital messages in “push” mode (I.E imposed on the user) as Promotional text messages (67%), mobile promotional notifications (63%) or full-screen banners (76%).

These findings invite advertisers to pass on their messages in a different way, through formats that are really useful to consumers.

Which website or which free application does not open today on an advertising format, more or less interesting … and more or less easy to close? The search for alternative revenues from online publishers seems to push them to use formats increasingly intrusive to pass, willingly or forcibly, advertising messages too quickly forgotten.

Beyond this empirical observation, the recent evolution of the digital media corroborates this impression. For example, in just one year, the proportion of advertising videos in the total number of online videos has more than tripled , reaching 64.2% in December 2015, compared with only 11, 7% at the end of 2016 (Source: Comscore).

In response to this growing surge of digital advertising, the Europeans adopt more or less active defense mechanisms. Some – like 48% of young people aged 25 to 43 years old (Source: Outbrain) – focus their attention on the “second screen” (smart phone, tablet) during television advertising cuts. Many Internet users, more resolute, install ad blocking software. We are now far from the epiphenomenon as some players, including the Ad block leader, will be installed on a good third of the browsers, acquiring new users with a record 43% growth per year (Source: Page Fair, August 2015). Google also seems to take up the problem, as the engine announced on February 6, 2016 an update of its Page Layout algorithm to penalize pages displaying too many ads.

Finally, on the e-mail side, electronic messaging now develops intelligent filters capable of identifying promotional messages and relegating them to separate files on personal communications, leading to a sharp fall in openness and reading rates.

Everything therefore encourages advertisers to think differently about their digital communication plan, to stop “pushing” their messages … and to start “pulling” consumers who are really interested in their products, if possible at the right time. How, then, can we ever manage to talk to consumers who are increasingly tight to communications? In a modern society characterized by the lack of time, advertising and non-advertising messages are now evaluated by the consumer through the utility value of each individual.

This utility value can exist in three dimensions

– The first dimension is of content

The message creates more commitment than the content it conveys, but also its graphic and technical presentation, are of exceptional quality. It must ultimately be useful to its recipient in the short term, or at the very least distract it … ideally both!

The only Push models that succeed today are based on these principles: My Little Paris or Time To Sign Off’s well-known e-mails are based on authentically interesting, rigorously selected content, carefully edited for a narrow target, and often presented in formats Innovations (videos, computer graphics, mini-games, etc.).

– The second dimension is targeting

An area where approximately can now lead to counterproductive results. It is no longer enough, as it’s done in traditional media, to interfere my interests through my age, the program I am watching, or my socio-professional category: I must now know my explicitly declared preferences, Those on which I never get tired of receiving new commercial offers that I then perceive as … relevant information.

Facebook has a considerable advantage in this respect, having for 10 years identified the “likes” of its members. Other major advertisers, such as Vente-Privée, which relies almost exclusively on “Push”, anticipated this trend by allowing Internet users to limit the emails received to only the brands or categories explicitly selected.

– Third and last dimension is that of the moment

And this is probably the most important. I welcome a relevant message if it appears to me precisely when I am in the information retrieval phase. One should not look elsewhere for the growing success and excellent tolerance of the sponsored links proposed by the search engines: they are generally identified as advertising, but Internet users greet by their click rate the quality of the information provided, Coupled with the appropriateness of this suggestion.

It is this notion of moment that gives Google a competitive advantage that social networks can never have: the search engine basically seizes the Internet user in a transactional disposition, while social networks display Advertisements, although targeted, but in a conversational context that is usually not the time of purchase.

The definition of advertising thus changes in depth, in that fundamentals and forms must fundamentally integrate these utility values. Consumers will be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff and focus on sources that, irrespective of their origin, will be genuinely relevant to them at the time of their research.

Some major media have not been mistaken: today’s major American newspapers are shifting their economic model towards native advertising, a modern form of 4-hand publishing, where journalists and marketers combine the attributes of ‘A trademark to a substantive article. In the coming months, there will undoubtedly be the emergence of new, rich, relevant and intelligently contextualized communication formats that could perhaps be nicknamed … “commercial” formats.

Azhar Iqbal, with more than 15 years of programming experience, posses a firm command over system analysis, system design and custom software solutions. He envisioned utilizing his extensive experience and expertise to elucidate Telephony Applications Development and design more practical solutions. You can reach him through his website Ranking Solutions or LinkedIn Profile.